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(Sorry for the long delay between posts – the intervening weeks have found me moving house from the Upper East to Upper West Sides of Manhattan; dealing with some weird health stuff; preparing for a(nother) totally unexpected joint reconstruction; and finalising my divorce from Paul. Work has been intense, but with significantly less travel.

That said, I’m just digging my way out of the chaos and putting my life back in order. So without further ado…)

A Quarterly Update on What I’ve Been Reading:

30. Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (memoir; story of the author’s life on a coffee plantation in Kenya as the unhappy wife of a Swedish Baron. Lyrical; descriptive; a product of it’s time, but respectful)

31. The Rules Do Not Apply – Ariel Levy (memoir; a long-er form of the author’s New Yorker “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” longform piece about miscarrying in Mongolia. The New Yorker piece was great. The Rules Do Not Apply was tedious, but Levy’s description of Al-Anon meetings struck a bittersweet chord.)

32. Ready Player One – Ernest Cline (dystopian fiction; this was particularly excellent in my estimation, but Cline has been criticised for his portrayal of female characters as conquests/objects, so watch for that.)

33. Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood (memoir; story of a girl whose father was a Catholic priest. Lockwood is a poet so this reads particularly lyrically, if a bit meanderingly. Enjoyable, but in my view, not that worthy of all the praise heaped upon it.)

34. Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity – Steve Silberman & Oliver Sacks(medicine; critical review of the history of autism science; whence it came; where it is going. This review of the science and the culture is an interesting and positive look at neurodiversity.)

35. Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates (memoir; journalist’s letter to his son reflecting on the black experience in America. Fascinating; heartbreaking; personal. Some of it’s just plain interesting because of who Coates is as a person; some of it’s eye opening because my experience is so different.)

36. Bleaker House – Nell Stevens (fiction/memoir; British MFA program participant gets a grant to go anywhere in the world to write her novel and she chooses the Falkland Islands. It’s a fun read, but it’s not that good.)

37. Grit – Angela Duckworth (nonfiction; book about the science of resilience.)

38. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – Neil de Grasse Tyson (physics; a primer on astrophysics; while not as brief or easy a read as the title would indicate, if you’re interested in science and the universe, it’s worth checking this out.)

39. The Winter’s Tale – William Shakespeare (theatre; if you’ve ever had a crazy jealous spouse, this never gets old.)

40. The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded – Molly McCully Brown (poetry; I heard about this book on the Fresh Air podcast where Brown was being interviewed after she won some prize for this work. She’s a poet with cerebral palsy and she was discussing being a writer with a disability. This collection of work was inspired by growing up near a state asylum. It’s really breathtaking – strong recommend!)

41. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather (fiction; the life and death of French priests in the frontier southwest.)

42. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl (psychology; I was told that this is “one of those books you have to read” – it’s the story of an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed his own approach to psychological healing and happiness.)

43. July’s People – Nadine Gordimer (dystopian-ish fiction; Gordimer’s dystopian vision of the end of South African apartheid.)

44. Autumn – Ali Smith (fiction; this one is from the Mann Booker Prize Shortlist and it’s being called the “first great post-Brexit novel.” Personally, I find Helen MacDonald’s post-Brexit writing a little more relatable, but that should probably speak volumes about me and my experience of Europe and England. This was an excellent, uncomfortable book.)

45. Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders (fiction; another Mann Booker Prize Shortlist pick. This is one of those books that is terribly hard to get into – the writing is choppy and told in many, many different voices, but once you get into it, you’ll be glad you stuck with it. It’s a clever, clever book, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the toughness.)

46. The Most Good You Can Do – Peter Singer (philosophy; Prof. Singer essentially writes about how to be a mercenary philanthropist; how to maximise the amount of good you can do in the world. Do you become an investment banker rather than an NGO worker because you can donate more cash? This book was recommended by a colleague’s college-aged daughter, and what Prof. Singer suggests challenged the hell out of me.)

47. Future Tense – Jonathan Sacks (religion; Rabbi Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of London and this book is about reframing the Jewish experience into one of positivity and community and suggesting that the things worth having are the things worth working for; asking the question “What Comes Next?” both in life and in faith.)

I do not like birds, but they have become a part of my consciousness lately.

I do not care for birds because when I was growing up, my mother one day brought home a pet cockatiel. My mother, like her father before her, was once famous for randomlyacquiring pets; is still the kind of woman who takes photographs of herself holding exotic animals all over the world. The pictures in question used to be displayed in my parents’ den, all in a row, on top of the big oak desk: My mother posing with koalas; Boa Constrictors; ridiculous Macaws or Cockatoos, one on each arm. I think there was even one of her holding a monkey.

I am not sure why my mother got the cockatiel, other than it being a natural outcropping of her Exotic Animal Thing. For her part, this fetish was less toxic than her father’s, because as the story goes, Bop once brought home a baby alligator, which he raised in their basement until he (the alligator) met his untimely end at on the broadside of a neighbour’s shovel. For the cockatiel’s part, though, the bird survived for a few years to holler his name (Murphy!!!!!!) into the high-ceiling’d abyss of parents’ family room, until he one day just dropped dead, either from the futility of it all, or the intemperateness of the room.

Secretly, I was glad, because, see above.

So over the last six months, I have noticed birds more; I am living out some winged metaphor, but I do not like them any better. I have become convinced they are a sign of something, but I cannot make sense of exactly what.

Perhaps this is grief. Perhaps I am just going insane.

With this background in mind, as I walked to the office the other day, I observed a bright red bird flit about from around the street trees, and then suddenly alight on my shoulder. I felt ridiculous. I kept walking, in hopes that the damn thing would startle off. But it did not. I felt like a Disney princess, except weirder.

When I arrived at the office, I quickly googled what is a cardinal a symbol of? But I didn’t know the bird was a cardinal at the time, so I was googling “robin,” until I realised what had landed on me was actually a cardinal.

…What is a cardinal a symbol of?

Would it not perhaps have been better to google, Why am I looking for symbolism in Disney Princess moments and in all of these chance encounters with birds?

The first hit was a page from California Psychics and it was then that I realised I was losing it. I had had a bird land on me and I was searching the internet for wisdom from California Psychics. Worse, this was on my work computer, so these searches were being saved to our back-end compliance system. The second hit was what looked like an early 00’s Geocities page featuring a woman in a Blossom hat, with extensive content about What Cardinal Sightings Mean In The Afterlife.

What am I searching for?

It seems like we are coping well in this era of second divorces, and widowhood, and beginning again, until these crystal clear moments of frantically searching the internet happen and I realise we are Obviously Not. I realise this is normal. I type it into that empty google search box until my browser is filled with pictures of birds.

I keep the bird stuff to myself, mostly. Because it’s weird. But it’s happening to all of us.

The week before Father’s Day, Dorota and Michael and Lady H and JRA and I decide to ride bikes along the Bronx River Parkway, which we do for hours, until I need to get back to the city for late drinks with RHJ.

As we begin our ride, there is a bird standing at the mouth of the bike trail, staring at me like the blue heron was back in January, and I want to scream What do you birds want from me? What are you trying to say?! But I don’t because that’s also weird and I have already spent an hour this week on the California Psychics webpage trying to decipher one close encounter.

But we get back to JRA’s house, and she mentions the bird, quietly at first, then she says she saw a dog she liked at a North Shore Animal League travelling event. I laugh, because she is So Not a Dog Person, then it dawns on me that when Bop died, we found piles of North Shore Animal League freebies in his things – he must have donated money – and that these animals and things have all had a message that maybe are connected and have nothing to do with some Geocities site and suddenly I say, Okay, so let’s go to the shelter event they’re hosting today!

We arrive at the parking lot event moments before it closes down for the day. JRA does not get a dog that day, but the next day she drives out to the north shore of Long Island, where the Animal League is headquartered, and comes home with the dog.

Am I a Disney Princess, I wonder? The evidence is clear: My long, blonde braid. Talking to the two dead guys I love through animals. No. It’s not that. I was convinced I was this logical lawyer, but what I realise now is that despite our best efforts, sooner or later we all turn into our mothers.

It is the Monday after the Third Sunday of Easter, and my dog, Roo, has gotten into a playful scrap with another dog. The damage at first seems minor (a bloodied ear, maybe) but by Tuesday morning, the dog is incapacitated and screaming, so I rush him to the vet.

Roo has never been seriously ill or hurt in all his seven years of life – an occasional gross stomach bug, but otherwise, nothing – and watching him in pain is excruciating. Once we arrive at the vet’s office, the doctor takes him out of the exam room, still screaming, to take a closer look at his injuries, and I fall backward into the chair, rubbing my temples, furious and terrified at my Inability To Do Anything Useful.

The depth of my Aloneness in this moment is nearly unbearable to me. Since my divorce from Andrew was final seven years ago, Roo has been my one constant companion. He has survived every crisis with me; celebrated every triumph. He has faithfully given me purpose when I felt I Could Not Go On. He sat beside me through all my surgeries; my injuries; my heartaches. He is a dog, and in his dogness has always known exactly what to do to help me when the going gets tough.

I, however, am human, and I rarely know what to do.

A prime example of my Chronic Inability To Know What To Do came early in my marriage to Andrew, when we had had to put my beloved terrier Lilly to sleep. When the critical moment came and the vet prepared to administer the permanent drugs, instead of holding on to my dog, or taking my husband’s hand, I ran from the room like a crazy person. I dashed out on to Lispenard Street; paced the block until it was all over, leaving Andrew alone with Lilly as she died.

It wasn’t that I was afraid of her dying – Lilly had been in kidney failure for months so I knew it was coming. At the Animal Medical Center, where they’d cared for her throughout the last days of her kidney failure, they had taught me to give her fluids under the skin so we’d have just a few more precious days together. In a spectacular display of desperation or denial, I had even gotten her groomed before we put her to sleep so she’d look pretty as she went to meet her maker. I think it was that I was afraid of something bigger; something emptier. I think I was afraid of grief itself.

And now here I am, with my dog who is screaming in pain, and I want to run away but I can’t because it is only me – he has only me – and I have never felt so alone in my entire life. The vet comes back and she gives me drugs for the dog, and tells me his neck is badly injured but he will recover. But it will be hard. It will take time. Everything will take time.

Later, RHJ says to me, It’s ok, I know that going through something like this with a beloved dog is hard…

And I try to explain, It’s not about the dog…but the words don’t come.

It is not about the dog at all. It is about remembering running from the vet’s office and into the street, terrified. It is about how, a week after Lilly died, the hospice called from Florida to say my grandmother was dying and my mother and I left a wedding in California; packing up and flying out the next morning to be by her bed to do the work that women do – bringing lives into the world, and shepherding them out of it.

It is about the fact that on the last night of my grandmother’s life, that Nat King Cole song, Unforgettable, was playing in the background, and I hadn’t been able to listen to it since, but inexplicably, as Paul was being fitted for his wedding suit, the Muzak screeched to a halt, and Unforgettable began to play. I took it as a sign that despite my doubts, Paul was the Right One, because I am always desperate for signs. But maybe that was the wrong sign.

I realise, as Roo recovers, that I have been waiting for signs to tell me how to be Helpful, or Right, or How to Do Things Correctly, like I am Steve Martin in L.A. Story. Symbols that indicate: How to Be Married to One Person for a Long Period of Time. How to Put the Dog Down and Not Run From the Room. How Not to Destroy Your Own Life in 200 Easy Steps.

After three weeks, Roo is walking again; acting like himself again. As I watch him lounge comfortably as I write, I am suddenly confident that there is no playbook for this. We are all just fumbling around, all of the time, blind like newborn kittens, mewling and suckling, with no earthly clue what we are doing. This revelation doesn’t make me feel any better about leaving my ex-husband alone with our dead dog in Tribeca Animal Hospital in 2006, but it at least gives me the sense that I am not nearly as alone as it sometimes feels. That everyone else is just as clueless and afraid as I am; just as prone to running screaming from the risk of loss.

We bury Pete on one of the coldest days of the year, which strikes me because we had buried Tommy, his younger brother, on one of the hottest. I once read an article in the New York Times about the importance of the rituals of death as part of the grieving process, and I wonder, as I drive to Long Island on the morning of Pete’s second and final memorial, if that is why my grief over my grandparents’ deaths has been so complicated. In their case, they had died a year and a day apart – necessitating two grim trips to Orlando during which I had inquired about formalities – and my mother had looked at me askance and asked: Why?

When Tommy died, back in July, Paul and I had been in Newport, because Andrew and I had always gone to Newport in summer and I never saw a reason to stop. After I’d taken JRA’s call about her brother-in-law, I’d come back to the table and motioned for the bartender to come refill my Sauvignon blanc, which she did, to the absolute brim, until the surface tension of the wine in the glass made a dome over the rolled lip of the sturdy barware, and we didn’t discuss the matter of the phone call further. But that night, I’d come down with my third case of shingles – this time an ophthalmic emergency – and I’d had to drive back to the city one-eyed the next morning.

Likewise, the day Pete died, I took to bed for a week with the flu and a 103F fever. When my therapist asked me, Perhaps we can deal with your feelings instead of letting everything become physical? I looked at her like she was crazy and told her, I have no idea what you’re talking about.

I arrive in Glen Cove and I stand with a clutch of family at the gravesite and then head into the now-familiar church with the carved wood walls, and the raised pulpit, which I remember so clearly from Tommy’s memorial in August like it was yesterday and not six months ago. I am meant to give a eulogy today so I sit near the front of the church – Dorota and Michael sit next to me. Once the sanctuary is fully packed, the traditional Episcopal service begins, and I listen to the other remembrances.

Then it is my turn to rise shakily and talk about my friend:

I first heard about Peter when he was a senior at Brown, and Jessica was describing the love of her life. I didn’t have a chance to meet Pete in person until a few months later at Campus Dance, when he rolled out of his fraternity house, laughing, and joking, and that kicked off what was to be a long friendship. And for years, I teased that I was the friend that stood out at Brown events – not Pete – because at many of those Brown parties and reunions, there was almost always more than one guy in a wheelchair, but there was only ever one painfully WASPy, conservative blonde.

Pete had remarked, in his writing, and throughout our friendship, that visibility mattered to him. Being in a wheelchair, and eventually, having all of his equipment, he occasionally commented that people noticed the stuff long before they ever got to know him. But one of the things that made Peter a remarkable friend was the way that other people were so highly visible to him; the way he could make you feel like you were the only person in the room when he talked with you. This was clear from how he was as a friend; obvious in how he was as a dad; I’m sure Jess will debate me on whether this is true about him as a husband, but I’m not sure there’s a wife who wouldn’t engage this debate.

This quality came out in his professional life as a social worker – a profession that Pete seemed tailor-made for. Pete often ran groups – providing support for families of individuals with disabilities and for men with disabilities themselves. My favourite story of Pete’s was early in his career when he came up with the idea to run a group for men with social anxiety. He prepared the materials; set up for the group…and no one ever showed up. Being a social worker had a learning curve.

Over the years, I had the good fortune of watching Jessica & Pete’s love grow – they loved each other fearlessly. They were always present to each other; visible to each other; kind to each other. Pete was an ordinary husband, who drove Jessica nuts in 1,000 perfect, loving, wonderful ways. To be presented with such significant challenges and still have such an ordinary love is one of the things I admire so much about Jessica, and one of the things I loved so much about Pete.

I also got to watch Pete become a father. About a week before Helen was born, I had dinner with Jess & Pete in New Jersey; walking along the Hudson on the way to the restaurant. I remember watching Peter watch Jess; seeing her expectant reflection in the window of some building along the waterfront. The moment still sticks with me – Helen, Meatloaf – I know your daddy saw you before you even came along and loved you from before he even met you. There’s no swimming stroke you’re not going to be able to conquer, and there’s no bird or animal you won’t be able to identify – you got your dad’s perseverance and concentration. Seeing the way Pete SAW Helen – not just for being his daughter – but as a person herself, was something to behold.

Finally, as a friend, Pete never failed to be present. Whether it was for game night – where he was a wicked contender – or coming to the city to watch me run yet another ill-advised race, Pete was in. In November, Pete came to watch me run my last marathon – knowing the significance of the feat of running on two reconstructed hips and a new knee. It took me longer than it’s ever taken me to run before, and I was so happy to see Pete, and Jess, and Helen at the end.

I think it’s easy to forget to see people. You see them for what you want to see them as, or for the role they play in your life. You can see the contraptions they carry around with them, but you can fail to see the person sitting right there in front of you. I’m so grateful to Peter for our years of friendship, and for helping me to see not just him, but myself, too.

(These remarks have been condensed and lightly edited from the original).

I make phone calls all morning, and finally, I reach my first husband at his office.

Hello, darling, I say. He understands instantly why I have called.

Andrew and I always had a plan. We would stay up late at night in bed, laughing, devising ways to escape the city in the event of an attack by Godzilla or Mothra. We had our future mapped to the moment; we anticipated every contingency and had more insurance than any two young people should have had. And even now, as we talk, our voices betray that intimacy of a first marriage – where you have been young together, and loved each other in a way that you make up as you go along, and you have listened to each other throwing up in foreign hotel rooms, and have been so irrationally mad at each other that you once cancelled the other person’s credit card mid-business trip.

But my voice catches, and I cannot ask him: How did I get here? Tell me, darling, what comes next?

What comes next is that JRA plans and hosts an abbreviated shiva, but I cannot make a shiva call because I have out-of-town commitments that I must keep, and anyway I am struggling mightily with this new vocabulary of tangential Jewishness.

Arrangements are made, and dates are set, and time begins to move very fast indeed.

I drive to Scarsdale one Sunday to ride bikes with Lady H and she takes off down the Bronx River Trail like a bat out of hell, leading me and JRA on the ride in the cold, pale January afternoon. She struggles on the hills but conquers them, a far cry from a few months earlier, when even the slightest incline terrified her. As the day grows smaller, we head back down the trail, along the river, and a large, blue heron stands silently in the water, staring at me as I ride.

H! H! I holler to my budding ornithologist companion, What kind of bird is this? But she has ridden too far ahead to hear me.

JRA pulls her bike up beside me to look. It’s funny because the one person who would know isn’t here to identify it, she says with a small smile. Pete had been a lover of nature and an avid watcher of birds, and I feel a wide, dull ache in my chest flap brokenly.

The heron is still staring at me as we ride away.

The first of two services for Pete is planned for the end of January, and Andrew tells me that he and his wife will be there. He and I talk a few times before the day-of – about love, and life, and loss, and interfaith relationships. His wife is a professor of Jewish Studies, and he is a lapsed Catholic; they are raising their children Jewish. It all sounds very complex, and it reminds me of when I had to convert to Catholicism in order to marry Andrew – the Bishop came to a church in suburban Maryland to perform my confirmation – and Andrew’s parents had flown in from Connecticut in support, but to this day I believe it was to ensure that I actually went through with the whole thing.

On the day of the service at the JCC, we all drive out from the city to Westchester in a car filled with flowers and food and wine to remember and to celebrate Pete. JRA and I go to the JCC ahead of the crowd to begin setting up for the service, and for one brief moment, we are alone in a room, just the two of us – no parents, no friends, no Lady H. We have been in this sort of waiting room prior to events before but they have always been happy occasions – my weddings; her wedding; just before Lady H was born – and now, here we are, preparing to celebrate the end of the beginning.

Friends begin arriving, and the service begins, and it is beautiful. It is mostly people I haven’t seen since my first wedding, or since JRA’s. People tell stories and share memories, and Dorota reads the Horace ode in Latin that a friend read when JRA and Pete got married. And because Pete had been an avid singer before muscular dystrophy had restricted his voice, his college acapella group, the Pirates, sing a sea shanty.

As the Pirates launch into the Mingulay Boat Song, my eyes scan the crowd for Andrew, who is a few rows ahead of me, sitting with his wife. I think back to that October day, ten years earlier, when JRA and Pete were married in Boston, and she and I had shared the same wedding veil, and she had floated down the stairs wearing it as the Pirates serenaded them. I watch Andrew’s wife dab her eyes with his handkerchief, and I watch him put his arm around her and draw her close, just as he had done to me a decade before on the opposite occasion.

The next day, JRA sends me a photo taken from her front porch – it is of a murmuration of starlings; hundreds of them. They have inexplicably descended upon her street – swooping down upon her yard and doing loops over the wheelchair ramp on her lawn.

If I were the type of person who believed in signs, she says, trailing off.

And for the first time in many weeks, I feel the ache in my chest flutter a little, and start to grow wings.

I leave Argentina by way of Chile on a Tuesday night, and then fly from Santiago to New York. It is different this time than the last time I left Santiago, on a New Year’s Eve upon the finalisation of my first divorce, when I spotted a couple in evening clothes in the airport. They boarded my flight, and had danced in the aisles on the plane – getting up when the pilot had announced the New Year – looking less like a portrait of true romance than a Jack Vettriano painting, or a line from that Paul Simon song, Rene & Georgette Magritte with their Dog After the War.

I remember, years later, looking at another Jack Vettriano print in a Newport, RI hotel room, that I had read that Rene Magritte had hated and been long-estranged from his wife; that Paul Simon’s lyrics were more likely borne out of his own longing than any recollection of the Magrittes’ true tenderness for each other.

My friends want to go for dim sum on Saturday following my return, and I say I will go until the reality of having to leave my house in a blizzard sets in. I text my best friend Jade saying, I am having a very hard morning, maybe I should stay home, and she tells me to go eat dumplings anyway.

Our plan is to meet at Golden Unicorn, a restaurant that takes up several floors in a Chinatown office building. Upon arrival, we are seated at a large, round table on a dais, and the ladies come around pushing carts full of little bamboo baskets. JRA and Lady H join us a few minutes into the meal. We stuff ourselves with little doughy packets for hours, and to my surprise, my mood lightens considerably. I watch Lady H tell eee her secrets – they talk about boys, and clothes, and swimming – and Michael leans over to tease me about my recent trip, and for one moment I stop asking How did I get here? And for one moment, I think that we are all going to be Okay.

The meal ends when the carts stop coming around, and from Chinatown, JRA, Lady H and I trek uptown in the snow to visit Pete at Mt. Sinai. When we arrive, JRA goes into the belly of the ICU, and leaves me and Lady H in the waiting room where we talk with the other waiting families about the things that strangers talk about to break up the heaviness of silence between them.

Then JRA comes to take Lady H in to Daddy, and I walk the halls of the medical ICU alone.

In December, they’d had someone playing Christmas music at the piano in the hospital’s atrium. The pianist had played Christmas classics, but never Merry Christmas, Darling, which was probably because it wasn’t the sort of song that lent itself to being played on a lobby grand piano. And I remembered, back in December, that I had never really noticed Mt. Sinai before. I had run past it hundreds of times; most recently in November when I’d run my final, foolish marathon, but I’d never seen that it was right there; right on the Park.

I begin to wonder how many other obvious things I haven’t seen.

It is getting late, and the snow is still falling, and after they finish visiting Daddy, JRA and Lady H decide to stay in the city at my house that night. We manage to find a taxi to get from the hospital to my house, and on the way, at a stop light, a woman tries to commandeer the cab to take her sick child to Cornell’s ER. We graciously step out, but the cabbie screams that he cannot pick up passengers below E. 96th St. Just take the fare, I tell him. But he refuses, and speeds off, and we are left with a couple with a sick kid, and a shaken Lady H, standing in the middle of a snowdrift on the Upper East Side.

The next morning is sunny and the roads are clear, and JRA and Lady H take off early for the suburbs.

That evening, I make chicken noodle soup and a friend comes over for dinner, and it is a normal, quiet evening. But at the end of the night as my friend is putting his coat to leave, my home phone rings. It is JRA, who tells me that Pete has taken a turn for the worse. We brainstorm some logistics, but I do not expect anything to change, because time is moving so quickly and also so slow.

I say that I am sorry because I am, and because I now know that the world looks different in the moments between when your friend is alive and dead; in the hours between when your friend was a wife and is a widow. Our call is quick, and I can hear JRA’s voice, but I am thinking about a WH Auden poem as she talks. I am transported back to a clear, cold afternoon in Dublin when Paul took me and eee to the cliffs of Howth; past a house W.B. Yeats lived in. My hips were hurting me then and I didn’t know why; I didn’t know then that my genes and my collagen were bad and there was nothing I could do. I felt helpless then, as I do now.

I am remembering that late May afternoon, when we walked in the brilliant blue, freezing sunshine, and we snapped photographs over the silent sea, and we ate 99s in the howling wind when we finished our walk. And even though I hated Flake bars, I still ate my ice cream but gave the chocolate away. I thought about poetry then, as I do now, and I thought about Yeats, and about the Auden tribute, which began:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,And snow disfigured the public statues;The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.What instruments we have agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day…